Why you should care

The beheading of freelance journalist James Foley shocked and horrified people all around the world, not least because his killers published a video of the act online. (Foley’s family has asked people not to watch.) Many in the West were surprised to learn that the killer was likely British, and not from a Middle Eastern country. Before you turn to Homeland as your explanation for modern terrorist sleeper cells, take a look at the OZY Syllabus on Islam in the U.K.

The News: Foley, Cameron and ‘the Beatles’

“It is an act of murder,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron of Foley’s killing. “It looks increasingly likely that [the killer] is a British citizen. … We know that far too many British citizens have traveled to Iraq and traveled to Syria to take part in extremism and violence.”

How do foreign fighters get plugged into extremist networks anyway? A full 2014 report on these tactics, including a look at a U.S.-based preacher who seems to be inspiring Syrian fighters, can be found at the U.K.-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Researcher Stefano Bonino works on the issue of radical Islam in the U.K. at Durham University. He points out that it’s not all Muslim-born people radicalizing: “British people who are not Muslim … [who] might be disenfranchised from society for all sorts of other (economic, social, political, etc.) reasons … [may] join the group that has been mostly stigmatized in the past decade” — meaning all kinds of disenfranchised British people are finding radical Islam as an outlet for their varied furies.

All (Muslim) politics is local, and as Charles Tripp, a professor of politics at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, wrote, the United Kingdom is no exception. His argument? That the politics of Muslims in the West don’t reflect some overarching religious conception; British Islamic militants are responding to deeply local problems — like discrimination.

… most of the conflicts involving Muslim immigrants in, for example, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom owed more to the policies pursued by these states’ governments than to the Islamic identities or even Islamist proclivities of the protagonists. …

These approaches have roots in the Netherlands’ and the United Kingdom’s imperial pasts … [In] the United Kingdom today, policies shaped by these traditions have prompted the authorities to be hands-off when it comes to their Muslim communities — at least until state security is threatened, at which point the state takes clumsy measures that many Muslims interpret as discrimination.

Further Reading:

Conservative Oxford-educated journalist Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan (2007) continues to inflect debates in the U.S. Terms to knowThroughout the 2000s, the language of multiculturalism was much heralded on the left, much criticized on the right. You can read Phillips on the topic in 2013.

Zadie Smith’s award-winning debut novel White Teeth (2000) follows — and satirizes — a group of new immigrants to the U.K. In one poignant moment, a teenager named Millat is recruited to an Islamic group on a playground … by a teen barely older than himself.

Hanif Kureishi’s 1994 prescient short story My Son the Fanatic, published in The New Yorker, tells of a London-dwelling taxi driver named Parvez who witnesses his son’s move toward a more orthodox relationship with Islam. Check out the trailer for the 1997 film:

Tell us what you think

Is there an article, book, movie, researcher, politician, thinker or anything else that’s helping you understand Islam, fundamentalism in the U.K. or hate crimes? Let us know in the comment section.